10 KiB
Rational or Rationalization?
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Author: u/notmy2ndopinion Concent of Saunt Edhar*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2oxzzt/rational_or_rationalization/
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Score: 13
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Created: 2014-12-11T05:03:49
Post:
I'm interested in personal narratives on the interface of Rational vs Rationalization. And in that spirit, I will bear all to those I see as kindred spirits (or aligned patterns of thought)
One of the chapters of HPMOR that struck me emotionally and literally left me breathless was on "How to Lose." I found my brain flashing back to various moments in my life where I refused to lose, and in doing so, lost something that mattered more. It is hard for people who try to adopt principles of optimization to lose graciously and when self-hatred is involved, it becomes a Doom Loop spiraling around self-blame, anger and excuse-seeking for imperfections. In other words, in the past, when I thought I could do better, I became aggressively angry and hostile, especially if my intellectual ego was on the line.
Cue pre-med. I was the sort of college student you might have met in organic chemistry, the quietly bright and strategic student angling for a way in to a successful career (not at any cost, but focused). And I failed to get in.
Not being admitted to medical school was probably the best thing that could have happened to me. In a period of a year, I was able to develop emotionally and step away from the meritocracy concept that I was "owed" something prestigious simply because I was intelligent. I found someone that made me happy for the first time in my life and she taught me that there's no point in driving yourself to a point of misery. I ought to seek a happy life for my own sake. I did apply for medical school again, and this time I succeeded -- but my path had changed for the better. I wasn't doing it for me (although I was curious to figure out how I worked as a human)... I was pursuing a career that I found was a calling for me to learn the life stories of new people every 15-20 minutes of my day. I didn't become the medical student "gunner" that would shoot other students down to look good myself. I always tried to do what was best for my patients and the medical team. I attribute a lot of this to the wisdom of the admission committees who turned me down the first time when they recognized that I needed to take time to mature and become ready for the next step.
Argyris has a great article on the Doom Loop for Professionals. https://hbr.org/1991/05/teaching-smart-people-how-to-learn
Professionals embody the learning dilemma: they are enthusiastic about continuous improvement—and often the biggest obstacle to its success. What’s more, most theories-in-use rest on the same set of governing values. There seems to be a universal human tendency to design one’s actions consistently according to four basic values: 1. To remain in unilateral control; 2. To maximize “winning” and minimize “losing”; 3. To suppress negative feelings; and 4. To be as “rational” as possible—by which people mean defining clear objectives and evaluating their behavior in terms of whether or not they have achieved them. The purpose of all these values is to avoid embarrassment or threat, feeling vulnerable or incompetent. In this respect, the master program that most people use is profoundly defensive. Defensive reasoning encourages individuals to keep private the premises, inferences, and conclusions that shape their behavior and to avoid testing them in a truly independent, objective fashion.
Rather than opening up, professionals are more likely to shut down after losing BECAUSE THEY ARE ACCUSTOMED TO SUCCEEDING. They don't know how to lose with grace and they don't know how to deal with the shame/guilt/anger/embarrassment To be good at losing, we need to practice losing well. And losing often.
I am an ENTP with the strongest traits of iNtuition and Thinking. This means that I can see the big picture and strategize very well. But when I am with my girlfriend, an ISFJ (polar opposite personality type) we will often clash, like Petunia and Michael Evans-Verres -- one trying to make the other feel guilty, or feel stupid. Once, in an argument, I even heard myself say "when I feel strong emotions of anger, I find that distancing myself from it through rational processes calms me down (although she would just say that it makes me colder and more robotic) and... that's rationalization."
That slip of the tongue revealed to me that I wasn't being rational. I was rationalizing. I was using a defense mechanism to avoid real issues and instead, I was trying to reinterpret my behaviors in the light of a more palatable "reasoning" process. Using rationalization makes her dislike the words "right" or "rational" because as a Feeler, she associates these words with the negative connotations of argument and disagreement.
True Reasoning moves beyond the petty boundaries of quibbles with a loved one. Don't Rationalize, people of Rationalia! Optimize your relationships and don't discount the strength of love.
Comments:
u/None [+4] (2 hours later)
I can also attest that just letting yourself lose is the single biggest lesson I ever learned about how to keep a relationship together. Once it gets to the point of an official We're Fighting situation, just lose. Both of you. Just do it.
You'll thank yourself when you calm down.
u/None [+3] (12 hours later)
I prefer to think of it as re-evaluating your criteria for success.
u/notmy2ndopinion [+1] Concent of Saunt Edhar (21 hours later)
It's nice to win by moving the goal posts :-)
u/None [+2] (23 hours later)
Avoidance of evaluating goal posts is NOT rational.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
It's irrational to never consider whether something is a terminal goal or an instrumental goal.
u/Chosen_Pun [+2] The Chosen Ones (9 hours later)
Personally, I think the Mythbusters said it best:
Failure is always an option.
u/Chronophilia [+2] sci-fi ≠ futurology (12 hours later)
I had a textbook that phrased it in the weirdest way:
You've always got the option of having just committed suicide!
(in fairness this was deep in an abstract discussion of game theory, but it sounds fantastic out of context)
u/chaosmosis [+1] and with strange aeons, even death may die (6 days later)
in fairness this was deep in an abstract discussion of game theory,
Would you explain?
u/Tehino [+4] (8 hours later)
I worry that you ove rappreciate the predictive power of the mbti-model. The model may be useful similarly to hogwarts houses or the powers of friendship, that is letting you more clearly reflect on and communicate the clusters in personality space they mark out, but there are few, if any, statistical correlations to learn something you didn't already know. As far as I know the mbti has a pretty lousy reliability as well as validity, and has never really been empirically supported.
Moreover, how is trying to calm down in an argument a rationalization? Do you see it as such because it puts you in a non-representative state of mind were you attempt to not care about things that actually matter to you? I would assume that most arguments become more productive if the involved parties are level headed, given that everybody are able to remember what they originally became upset about and what problems they feel need solving.
u/notmy2ndopinion [+3] Concent of Saunt Edhar (20 hours later)
Perhaps it was not clear, but the point of the article was to highlight differences in viewpoints and how important it is to able to lose with grace. I'm not pushing the MBTI model as a "valid" interpretation of reality, in the sense that you ask for, but I will say that for qualitative research, the theory of MBTI merely needs to be useful with components of trustworthiness (paralleling internal validity) and transferability (paralleling external validity), as well as dependability (paralleling reliability.) This is not to say that it doesn't meet a "higher standard" that a positivist/post-positivist would ask for with quantitative confirmation... merely that it fulfills a different set of standards since it is a different paradigm.
My point about heated arguments is that I use "Rationalization" as a defense mechanism. At the time, I might THINK I am trying to calm down and be rational, but if I reflect back on old patterns of behavior, I only justified a flawed position and made excuses.
I recognize that there are people here who are more level-headed than I am. It was nice to see that Harry Potter and by proxy, Eliezer Yudkowsky, can sympathize with me. (Granted, when HP gets angry, he gets smarter whereas I get dumber.)
u/chaosmosis [+1] and with strange aeons, even death may die (6 days later)
From a negotiation standpoint, it can sometimes be beneficial to not know how to lose. (Some people have speculated Quirrell has selfish sinister reasons he wants Harry to become familiar with losing rather than escalating.)
I bring this up because it demonstrates how emotions are subtle evolved heuristics that quite often are smarter than they seem. Divorcing ourselves from our emotions while reasoning about a problem can be an important part of the process. But the end goal should be to have emotions which coordinate with our thoughts, and so we should try to avoid "robotic" behavior.
Oftentimes, I find that after a few moments thought I am able to couch my rational arguments in more emotional terms (though they still involve functional arguments), which makes this sort of dispute easier for everyone. I've actually found that doing this helps me to bring otherwise unseen contextual ideas into prominence, which helps prevent hidden assumptions from controlling the conversation.
This might or might not be helpful to you when talking with your girlfriend. I figure that there's no significant cost to putting this idea out there for you, at least.